Best Storyline of 2001

Share.

Your choice and ours for the best Xbox game in the category.

By IGN Staff

Two weeks ago, we all took a great big leap into the future, uh, present. 2002 is now upon us, and to celebrate the gaming goodness of 2001, we asked you all to vote for the best games of the year across a variety of exciting categories.

Since we didn't want to influence you (we know how much you rely on our *ahem* expert opinions), we decided to keep our own list of favorite games a secret. Well, the voting is now over, and we're ready to unveil our picks as well as yours.

Today and tomorrow, we'll be unveiling the top picks for 2001, both yours and ours, across the aforementioned variety of categories. Not surprisingly, there's a lot of crossover among them, but sometimes we didn't always see eye-to-eye. The great thing is that we're giving awards based on your picks as well, so your picks will get the recognition they deserve. But feel free to complain anyway.

Below you'll find the cream of the crop in Xbox gaming, and if you haven't had a chance to check out any of the games mentioned below, you owe it to yourself to pick them up and give them a play.

Why it rocked: You earned cut scenes in Halo by kicking Covenant ass, and when another piece of the puzzle came your way, you felt justified in doing so. Now it doesn't take much motivation for us to blast aliens with our shotguns --we'd have done it no questions asked-- but it was quite a nice touch that Halo put things into such grand life-or-death perspective for us along the way. Now if they would only tell us why an artificial intelligence like Cortana was built like a brickhouse.

Why it rocked: Great choice on the best story of 2001. Max Payne garnered the second most votes but it was really no contest. By the time you got to the end of Halo you felt as if you'd just come out on the right side of some immense life or death struggle and it's pretty tough for a game to do that, even nowadays. Sci-fi stories have a natural advantage when it comes to videogames, but Halo took no shortcuts.